Ideas in the Wild: Katie B. Happyy Aims To Show Us How To Love Where We Are & Cheers the Chaos Around Us

Katie B. Happyy has always taken inner transformation seriously — and with a healthy dose of humor. But when she woke up in 2015 with Bell’s Palsy and couldn’t move the right side of her face, her spirit took a giant pause. Still, Katie fought through, giving up society’s definitions of beauty and becoming an international lululemon model and ambassador featured by NBC, CBS, and Shape magazine. Her global company, b inspired — an LLC and 501(c)(3) charity organization — has changed thousands of lives across over thirty countries, helping broken badasses recover from loss, rediscover their power, and find their calling.

Now, in her new book Cheers to Chaos: 8 Tools for the Puffy-Eyed and Powerful, Katie details her wonderful hot mess of a life — from her challenges with modern dating apps to the sudden facial paralysis that left her unable to smile. Along the way, she offers readers unique tools and techniques to magnify their confidence and infuse their life with financial abundance, spiritual freedom, relational success, and optimal health. I recently caught up with Katie to learn what led her to write the book and the biggest lesson she’s learned on this journey.

What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?

When most little girls dream about getting married or their wedding day, I always dreamt to see my name on the binding of a book. And I always loved the spoken word or the written word. It was the most exciting thing for me to narrate a lot of parts of my life, but in a way that tickles your brain. I love poetry. I love when words literally just make so much sense that it’s the words that you wanted, but you never knew that they could be put together in that way. And that’s what the magic of writing and what makes authors special, is they put words in your brain that you wanted to say, but didn’t have the exact way to express them.

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to write them. I was always a writer. So I don’t think there was an exact moment that I needed to write this book. I do think that when I got my Bell’s palsy when I was 27, that was a moment where I was like, OK, this is defining enough where I’m going to write as much as I can down about it. Take all the notes.

I journaled deeply every day about every little detail I was feeling so I wouldn’t forget. I have a really horrible memory, so I write a lot. When I first started taking yoga, I started journaling in my voice notes. I have a ton of voice notes and it used to be called “crazy stories of the yoga pants.” I wrote down the funny stuff, like the first time I taught yoga and I wore my yoga pants backwards. That’s such a yoga girl problem, because you just never know where the tag is.

So, there wasn’t a defining moment. There was just the feeling that I had something to tell and I had fun telling it. Then Bell’s palsy was that shift forward that was like, OK, people need to hear about this because I’ve for so long taken my smile for granted. You know, when you wake up and you can’t use your smile, there’s just so many other things in the world that don’t matter.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned going through the journey you share in the book?

I think everything is fun and quirky and important, but what helped me most while writing this book was the idea that “less is more.” Or, the parking lot principle. I’ll never forget when Tucker (Max, Scribe co-founder) told me “Put that in the next book.” When I started thinking about the people I admire, the profiles I follow, or the things that I like, it’s often that less is more.

One of the big inherent paradoxes that kept coming up for me was that what’s small is big in our life, and what’s big is small. In the book, I talk about my biggest career highlight, but that feels small in comparison to some of the minute details of my life, like opening the box full of 50 copies of my book today. The small things really do matter. Writing this book made me take a deeper look and all the small moments that happen in this big life story of mine.

How will you apply this lesson in your life moving forward?

I will celebrate the small stuff, but I’ll also just acknowledge that the small stuff can add up to make a huge difference. One green drink replacement a day versus a Coca-Cola, at the end of the year, you could lose 26 pounds with that one small change. Or, think about your commute to work every day, which for most people is 30 minutes one way, so an hour a day. If you took that commute over the course of a year, it’s almost seven 40-hour work weeks. Think about what you could do with that time. You could learn a whole new language. Yes, you could spend that time scrolling Instagram, but what if you were intentional about filling your brain with empowering things? Almost seven work weeks of empowerment — that’s awesome!